A KPI dashboard for early-stage SaaS startups

Interesting but only works if you have a consumer or SMB product. Enterprise sales is a completely different game, where granularity (at least at the beginning, when you have just a few sales a year) prevents you from doing sexy dashboards like this one.

chrija3• 13 years ago

Agree - which is why I called it "A simple KPI sheet for early-stage SaaS startups with a low-touch sales model". I would argue that one can create a sexy dashboard for an enterprise sales based model too though. :)

mindcrime2• 13 years ago

If you have any interesting thoughts on that ("a sexy dashboard for enterprise sales") I, for one, would love to hear them.

We're an enterprise software startup, and both founders are techies, not salespeople. I'm working on learning enough about sales to get up past the initial "hump", until we can hire real salespeople. In the meantime, any thoughts on what metrics to track and their value / usage, would be much appreciated.

FWIW, we are working on developing a sales process largely rooted in Solution Selling and the ideas from Jeff Thull ("Mastering The Complex Sale", "The Prime Solution", "Exceptional Sales", etc).

aymeric2• 13 years ago

What tools do you guys use to be able to track these metrics? Mixpanel I imagine is one of them?

tosh2• 13 years ago

At Blossom.io our KPI dashboard is powered by KISSmetrics, Google Analytics and billing information from Saasy (FastSpring).

hu_me• 13 years ago

Interesting. are you guys manually updating the dashboard? How frequently?

aymeric2• 13 years ago

I find it hard to justify $150/month ($1800 per year) for analytics :(

bwertz• 13 years ago

Great template - most of my SaaS portfolio companies use very similar metrics templates. One addition would be YoY numbers so that you can better account for seasonality.

chrija3• 13 years ago

Great suggestion re. YoY numbers, Boris. I didn't include it in the template because I've entered only a few months of sample data, but in real-life this should definitely be added and I will keep it in mind for the next version.

kpras• 13 years ago

For SaaS startups I found this post by David Skok to be very informative and comprehensive http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics/ . It is a bit old now but is still very relevant. Author talks about David Skok in the article too.

Edit: Added ref to David Skok

casca• 13 years ago

Google Docs version here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkJVUDhVuAHldE1...

Excel version available by emailing the author

tosh2• 13 years ago

I just recently rebuilt our KPI dashboard for Blossom.io and read through the following spreadsheets/posts/pdfs …

* Christoph Janz – http://christophjanz.blogspot.de/search/label/financial%20pl...

* David Skok – as mentioned in the article (http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics/)

* Ryan Carson – http://bit.ly/9w8eJ5 (talk: http://video.seedcamp.com/video/867124/seedcamp-week-2010-me...)

* Bessemer Venture Partners – http://www.bvp.com/cloud

Had a ton of a-ha moments and learned a lot. Highly recommended.

A KPI dashboard for early-stage SaaS startups

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